In Shadow, Together
by Astralis
Summary: Nigel Crane has been arrested, but his shadow remains. Postep for Stalker, NS.


**DISCLAIMER: **I don't own anything. I've got the whole "poor student" thing happening.

**AUTHOR'S NOTE:**Post-ep for _Stalker_.

* * *

It's over.

Yes, immediately it is. Maurice Pearson is dead on his floor and there's a great big hole in his ceiling and the cops are manhandling Nigel Crane away, but in many other ways it isn't over and he knows this already with a sudden sinking feeling of dread and a new kind of fear.

He doesn't want to live with this, but like Jane Galloway he has no escape route.

The cops must have given the all-clear because Sara is _there_, her own fear shining in her eyes as she reaches for him. Clinging; but he doesn't mind because he needs her, cracked ribs or not. He needs her life, her reality, her warmth. What can he say? There's no "It's all right, Sara," because it isn't all right and anyway, right now, he can't talk, can't articulate words. Doesn't want to, anyway, and it amounts to the same thing: silence. The press of his body to hers, muscles and skin and breath, is communication enough. Life in this new darkness.

Where do they go from here? Brass says hospital, something registered somewhere in the back of Nick's mind, but he says no, finally making himself speak. He wants just Sara, wants their own silence and companionship far away from prying curious eyes: this is public affection for the first time, except for Nigel, and he doesn't want to count Nigel but he must. Nigel _saw_, Nigel _knows_. All that was secret and sacred to them he has seen through the little peephole in the ceiling. He hears again Nigel's words, taunting, about having a thing for redheads, like he and Nick were pals - like Nick and Warrick maybe. Nick tenses again hearing the words unwillingly, Nigel's voice so close to saying what Nick doesn't want him to say, half-relieved when Nigel says only "you say her name in your sleep". He doesn't, didn't, whatever, want Nigel to say Sara's name. That Nigel never did say that name means something, at least, is some kind of half-satisfactory consolation.

They have to go, have to move, because this is a crime scene now and it's not their job to work it. Sara's under control again, the strong one, she will be the strong one this time. He's still not thinking straight, so he lets her just take his hand and lead him and he follows, trusting, out of the house. He sees curious gathered neighbours and strangers, more cops, and Catherine and Grissom and Warrick standing in a privileged position inside the artifice of the crime scene tape. He doesn't want to talk, doesn't want to see curious stares because Nigel is enough. He feels like a criminal in the cop car but it was the nearest place he could go where it would be just him and Sara, and it seems to be the consensus, anyway, that that's where they should be.

Time passes, but he's still stuck in his mind, events circling, cycling, recycling, driving him mad. He has to make a statement, alone on the wrong side of a PD interview room table struggling to find words that are factual rather than emotional, and trying, in this coldly sterile environment, not to cry. Next comes standing with the others watching Nigel through the glass: a caged animal in the zoo perhaps - but who was the caged one? One of those terrifying controllable thoughts Nick doesn't want to have, but Grissom is in the background like a textbook, talking, talking, the only way he can explain. It doesn't help, Grissom's explanations for anything that's not really hard science don't usually, but their mere unusual predictability is enough. For a moment he is alone in the glass room, watching Nigel being taken away - somewhere, anywhere, he doesn't care - but then Sara comes back and takes his hand again. It's new, this touching in public thing, and a little uncomfortable, but at the same time safe, stable, solid. Trustworthy, when other things in which he has placed his trust fail him.

There is nothing else he can do with his fears, his terrors, the new and sudden ones and the ones that are as old as his self-knowledge. He must hold them, hold them in common with this woman with the anxious eyes. Nigel has given him nothing good, and he has snatched too much, but he has left Nick with enough. Enough to live his life with.

Passing time becomes passing days, and with those days Nigel begins slowly to recede. Nick doesn't go home because it isn't home: it has been violated, invaded, trashed. PD check Sara's place while they stand together in the living room hoping desperately that Nigel didn't follow them here, that this place at least was safe. For whatever reason Sara's apartment remains a place unscarred physically by Nigel Crane, and so that is their refuge, their sanctuary. By slow degrees it becomes his home too, hearts and bodies linking together more than was possible in that old half-secret flitting from place to place and hiding, but not well enough. There is quiet disapproval from Grissom as supervisor, but not as a man: he is not heartless.

So they live, he and Sara, sharing secrets, memories, a bed, _life_. Nigel has been everything, nothing, all that there is and a deep dark emptiness. He was an intruder. Is an intruder, because he doesn't go away.

But for all that, there is Nick and there is Sara, together, and that is the one thing which Nigel couldn't steal or weaken or destroy. Couldn't appropriate for himself, though Nick is scared that if everything hadn't come to a head with Jane Galloway maybe he would have tried.

Life. Togetherness. The shadow with which they must live waxes and wanes in strength, like the moon but without that almighty overpowering beauty. Instead the memory is sharp in its ugliness, but together they can almost defeat it.

Nigel, at least, left them with that, but they all know in their bones it will never be over.

* * *

THE END


End file.
